Claude calibrates its effort to the perceived stakes. A casual question gets a casual answer. Raise the stakes and the quality goes up.
The Prompt
This is going to a senior audience who will judge it harshly.
Make sure every claim is defensible, every recommendation is
specific, and nothing is filler.Examples
For code:
Write this as if it's going into a production system
that handles payments. No shortcuts, no TODOs, handle
every error case.For writing:
This is for a published article, not a draft. Every
sentence needs to earn its place. Cut anything that
doesn't add new information.For advice:
Pretend I'm paying you $500/hour for this advice.
Be specific, actionable, and don't waste my time
with things I could have Googled.Why it works
Claude has a sense of what “good enough” means for different contexts. When you signal that the bar is high, it spends more effort on precision, specificity, and completeness. The same question with “this is for a quick prototype” vs “this is going to production” gets noticeably different answers.